Actor David Thewlis on the ‘Fargo’ Season Finale, V.M. Varga and Greed

“Fargo,” Noah Hawley’s crime anthology series on FX, introduced memorable villains in its first two seasons. But in the third, which aired its final episode Wednesday, a different beast emerged. David Thewlis’s turn as V.M. Varga, a bulimic loan shark with decaying teeth and far-right political leanings, has been a hilariously chilling aspect of this season’s exploration of “alternative facts” and magical realism. Reached by telephone in London the day after the British elections, Mr. Thewlis discussed bingeing, purging and politics. Following are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Did you have to decompress, or metaphorically take a shower when filming was done?

I shaved my head. In the last scene, which is a jump of 5 years, we discussed how we’d make Gloria [played by Carrie Coon] and myself look older. That was the last thing we shot of the whole season. I had this idea that we’d thin his hair out and chop into my hair, without going over the top with aging makeup, just to make me look like I’d aged 5 years with the hair. So at the end of that night, I said, “Just shave the lot of it.” As a way of getting rid of Varga. But I kept me teeth.

Was the toothpick in the script, or was that something that you brought to it?

Noah had already come to me with the idea that Varga was purging, bulimic — hence the teeth. When we were doing the camera test, Noah asked someone if they could hand me a toothpick, and instructed me to dig away until the gums were bleeding. I always thought, “Oh, he’s pre-plotting this, and somehow this toothpick’s going to become a weapon in some way before the end of it, or a tool of torture.”

That’s an interesting point: The most violent thing Varga does physically is spray Emmit in the eyes with breath spray.

As an actor, I was a bit like, “How can I not kill anyone? I’m in ‘Fargo,’ I’m the bad guy.” Well, I suppose I poisoned Cy. I felt that I should at least get to stab someone brutally or do something absolutely grotesque. But by the end, I like that in a way he’s sort of clean of that. You never do see him commit any grand violence, but we see that he’s absolutely nihilistic in terms of what he’s prepared to do.

In the fourth episode, when we see Varga as the wolf, that’s apt. But there are quite a few moments, especially when he escapes the elevator by leaving the trench coat, where he seemed reptilian, like a lizard leaving its tail behind.

I sort of felt him more reptilian myself, actually, and the way I was portraying him was more snakelike. I actually read something online about someone comparing the regurgitation of snakes to what I do, in terms of the purging, the vomiting. I often do that with characters, going back to my bloody drama-school days, in terms of equating them with creatures. And it’s very much there as a theme of all the seasons of “Fargo” as well: the predator and the prey.

It’s shocking when you realize that he’s bulimic. And in the ninth episode, when he’s on the toilet eating ice cream, that type of vulnerability was surprising amid his confidence.

The first time you see this eating disorder, I wasn’t sure if it was a sign of his lack of control or a sign of his supreme control, in that he will gorge himself as an expression of his greed, but he’s in control of it because he won’t take it on board. Or is it a vulnerability? And I thought in Episode 9, where he’s gorging on the ice cream, then you do see it as vulnerability. He’s basically comfort eating. Because for the first time he’s threatened. For the first time, you see him losing control. And I think the way that was shot was much more desperate. Even though it was actually my favorite scene because I just love ice cream [laughs]. Doing several takes of me eating ice cream was fantastic.

How many pints did you go through?

To be honest, not as many as I wanted.

The speech that he gives Emmit in the fourth episode — there’s so much that springs from that about what’s happening in the world now, in the reference to “the time of the refugee.” He alludes to this class war that is part of what’s going on in America and the rest of the world.

Obviously me living in North America, Canada, at the time, I was watching an awful lot of American news. I was sort of hooked on it. I also found it was becoming increasingly appropriate to the portrayal of Varga, the understanding of Varga and his worldview. I got hooked to American news like a great TV season. It plays like fiction. I would come home from work and I would put it on, and I would stay up until 2 in the morning watching it, and get up in the morning and watch it.

Fargo S3 E4 | V.M. Varga's MonologueCreditVideo by The Best Scenes

I’ve seen other people refer to Varga as Trumpian, but if we are to believe that his mother was a servant, then he’s actually not coming from an elite place.

That was the real key to me for the character. When that was mentioned in Episode 4, I was like, “Oh, I’ve got something to hang on to.” Even with the accent I chose to do. We weren’t even sure he was going to be British at first — or I wasn’t when Noah started first describing him to me. We knew he wasn’t American. When it was mentioned that he’s the son of a housemaid, that was a relief to me, that I could place him in a class. A lot of the city boys in London, a lot of the hedge-fund, young city workers at the height of the financial boom, were a lot of working-class, brilliantly minded young fellows and women. I sort of imagined him in his early days being exactly that. I lived near the City of London, near the financial district, and I’m very familiar with those kinds of characters.

Noah puts these things in the season that are like magic, or divine intervention. And Varga seems at times like some superhuman being who believes he can change reality. At the same time, his behavior seems to be sanctioned by some entity, either a government or some official. Is he completely delusional, or is he really protected?

I like that you think he’s delusional. I like to feel that he is going to walk away and hopefully walk again one of these days [laughs]. I spent a lot of the series wondering if he was supernatural, given that we have the thing with the Paul Marrane character [played by Ray Wise], who is clearly some kind of supernatural entity. And given Yuri’s story, and given what “Fargo” tends to do with reality. And in these references to who exists and who doesn’t exist — both Gloria and I at some point in the season say, “I’m not sure I exist.” I was always on to Noah, like, “I know I’m not to know exactly what’s going to happen in this story, but maybe you should tell me if there’s something I should know about the final episode, and I’m going to rise up through the clouds or something’s going to happen that I’ve not known about.” But he always insisted that I was real. But certainly that final scene, the lights going down — which I thought was rather beautifully Beckettian in terms of how that was filmed — it felt like something out of a Beckett play the way it all closes down at the end.

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